AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PUTERAEON — “MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS”

(written by Islander)

We should begin this album-premiere feature with what the great Dan Swanö has said about Puteraeon‘s forthcoming fifth album, Mountains of Madness:

“I have had the pleasure to work with Puteraeon since 2017 and their releases have always been solid, but the quality of this new album completely took me by surprise. It is just so damn good it’s hard to fathom! It’s like they thought about every little detail on how to make the album brutal as hell, yet memorable and extremely epic. I dare to say this one will go down in the history books as one of the best Swe-Death releases ever.”

If that doesn’t make you sit up straight and pay attention, probably nothing will — though the name of the album and Ola Larsson‘s cover art should also seize your attention.

photos by Daniel Sommer

The name of the album, of course, is drawn from H.P. Lovecraft’s horrifying tale At the Mountains of Madness. It might be Lovecraft’s magnum opus of terror, or certainly one of the leading candidates, but as our contributor Zoltar noted in introducing an interview of Puteraeon‘s Jonas Lindblood that we published here earlier today, few (if any) metal bands have sought to musically tackle the tale because it isn’t an easy thing to translate through songs, even through the kind of dark and daunting Lovecraft-inspired old-school death metal that Puteraeon have made their stock in trade.

The challenge, as Zoltar posited and Lindblood agreed, is that the book isn’t especially “action-packed,” and includes many things “more suggested than actually shown.” But Lindblood and his bandmates didn’t shy away from the challenge — they relished it. As Lindblood stated in the interview, what he loved about the book was that it “has a special kind of feel to it… the cold, the remote location, the snow, the catacombs, and something alien, evil lurking.” It seems that seeking a similar “feel” was part of the goal behind the making of the music.

And based on the music itself, Puteraeon triumphantly rose to the challenge, creating their best work yet in a 17-year career. To borrow the words of Emanzipation Productions, which will release the album on May 30th, “the record captures the overwhelming terror and cosmic dread of the novella through unrelenting riffs, crushing heaviness, and an atmosphere of pure, otherworldly horror…. This is Swedish death metal at its most intense, atmospheric, and unforgiving.”

Lovers of Lovecraft will of course be drawn to the album, and some may be inclined to re-read the novella and explore how well the sequence of songs maps the book’s sequence of events into a sonic narrative. But, to return to the interview, Lindblood explained that “[w]hen the first riffs were created we didn’t know what story they would tell,” and that he had more-or-less built three or four complete songs before deciding to follow At the Mountains of Madness (though one suspects he had the Lovecraft universe in his head when writing them, even if a specific story wasn’t yet front-of-mind).

So at this point we should say that it isn’t necessary to know Lovecraft’s novella or even a summary of its events to become captivated by Puteraeon‘s album. Even without that knowledge, hearts will hammer and nightmare visions will unfold.

The album succeeds in creating a quickly encroaching and eventually engulfing atmosphere of mystery, dread, and ultimate insanity – and we’ll come back to how it does that — but it also provides a cornucopia of neck-wrecking, gut-churning, and mind-mauling riffs, backed by bone-bruising bass-lines, vertebrae-cracking beats, and monstrous vocals. We don’t have to be mind-readers to guess that devout fans of old-school Swedish death metal will love the record.

The grooves in the songs are themselves monstrous (monstrously heavy and compulsive), both when the momentum is a heaving horror and when the band are charging ahead like a high-powered wrecking machine. The changing drum patterns add extra electricity as they veer from brute-force pounding to d-beat scampering, pulse-pounding gallops, and lights-out blasting.

The songs’ malignant melodic hooks are damned potent too, many of them created through lead-guitar accents and solos that are shrill and piercing in tone, in contrast with the familiar mangling distortion of the crushing and disemboweling riffage and the megaton heaviness of the bass-lines. Those guitar accents quiver and wail, scream and soar, moan and ooze, and convulse in spasms of insanity and misery.

Meanwhile, the vocals of Lindblood and his bandmate Rune Foss (sometimes combined for enhanced horror) run the gamut of ferocity and madness, ejecting gritty snarls, ravenous howls, gruesome roars, and unhinged screams. The brief bit of singing in “The Nameless City” is a surprise, but works very well, especially because it precedes a phase of exotically alluring guitar melodies in that song — a track that turns out to be a huge mid-album highlight precisely because it’s so multi-faceted.

Those piercing guitar leads and solos mentioned above have a great deal to do with the album’s creation of supernatural atmospheres of mystery, dread, and derangement. But the groaning, suffocating weight of the songs achieved when Puteraeon slow down also contribute significantly to the album’s moods of horror and fear, and it bears repeating that the enormity of the bass is one key to that achievement (and it often sounds deranged itself).

We haven’t covered all of the atmosphere-related accents that surface, so let’s mention a few more: the plaintive piano melody in the intro to “Gods of Unhallowed Space” and the phase of vast astral eeriness that closes that song; the sinister and slithering (but also haunting) guitar-leads and uber-deep spoken-word recitals within “The Rise of the Shoggoths“; the pulsating, calliope-like riffs in “Watchers at the Abyss“, which takes us to the brink of madness in exhilarating ways (and is also one of the best neck-wreckers and circle-pit-triggers on the record).

Where the story ends is “I am the Darkness“, a song that combines melancholy and frantically miserable melodies, full-throttle rampaging, and… of course… feelings of head-long flight from terror and the shattering of sanity.

And with that, at long last, we’ll choke off this flood of words and let you experience for yourselves an album that (to quote Mr. Swanö again) really should “go down in the history books as one of the best Swe-Death releases ever.”

PUTERAEON Lineup:
Jonas Lindblood – vocals & guitars
Rune Foss – guitars & backing vocals
Daniel Vandija – bass
Anders “Hammer of Gs” Malmström – battery

The album was mixed and mastered by Dan Swanö. It will be released on LP (black vinyl and white vinyl, both limited to 200 copies), jewel-case CD, and digital formats. Pre-orders can be placed now via the links below. Also below, we’ve included the three videos released by the band in the run-up to the release date.

PRE-ORDER:
Webshop: https://bit.ly/put-trgt
Digital: https://bfan.link/ptr-mnt

PUTERAEON:
https://puteraeon.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/puteraeon
https://instagram.com/puteraeon